CMU School of Drama


Monday, October 29, 2018

How Music Festival Artworks Are Created

Artsy: Art is often the unsung hero of music festival season. Less attention-grabbing than the headliners and less click-baity than the fashion trends, the horizon-breaking installations, colorful murals, and kinetic sculptures that dot concert landscapes tend to play a backseat role. But as anyone who has been to a music festival knows, it is the art that transforms a patch of dirt and grass into a place that feels light years away from a nearby parking lot or a surrounding city.

3 comments:

Davine Byon said...

I have no words to adequately explain how much this article excited me about the professional world. Large-scale temporary work holds such a unique niche in the art world, from its conception as a backdrop to a music festival, to its legacy and immortalization through media. I can only try to wonder what those design conversations are like-- who’s in the room, what the inspiration boards look like, how the perfect materials are decided on. I’ve always known that I am interested in spatial design (in and outside of the theater sphere), and as a festival-goer myself, I have definitely felt the impact of the worlds created by festival artwork. I checked out Poetic Kinetic’s website, and they list “Theatrical Costuming and Set Design” as one of their team’s areas of expertise. When I came to a drama school, I worried that I was going into a limiting field. Instead, I am constantly learning about ways in which my interests outside of theater (in this case, live music) in the traditional sense overlap with the skills I will learn throughout my education here.

Samantha Williams said...
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Samantha Williams said...


I have been a fan of electronic music since middle school. Being way too young to actually attend any of the concerts, I spent hours watching live streams of them from my living room instead. I became fascinated with the stages and festivals setups my favorite music artists worked in (I even bought a movie about the creation of one festival on iTunes). Staring at these massive flashy stages and festival installations was a wondrous visual experience for me, but I guess I did not realize until now that these pieces of art were created for beyond visual purposes, such as providing shade and transitioning from day to night with ease. It is an element like these that add a “WOW” factor to festivals, and makes them worth returning to the next year. The bigger and more colorful the sets get, the more its audience gets involved . Also, they really show the care the festival producers have for the experiences of their patrons.